March 19 (Bloomberg) -- DBS Group Holdings Ltd., the
Southeast Asian bank which wants to manage more millionaires’
money, has its sights set on becoming a bigger player in the Dim
Sum bond market.

The Singapore-based lender is this year’s fourth-biggest
arranger of offshore yuan-denominated notes, pushing
Agricultural Bank of China Ltd. out of the top 10 for the first
time since 2010. It’s helped to arrange 7.4 percent of sales
since Dec. 31, compared with 3.1 percent in 2013, when it ranked
10th, Bloomberg-compiled data show.

“Most issuers we bring to the market we also have a
lending relationship with,” Clifford Lee, the bank’s Singapore-based head of fixed income said during a press briefing in Hong
Kong yesterday. “Our approach to climbing up the league table,
and hopefully staying among the top five or six, is essentially
to couple our balance sheet with an execution capability that
can rival the best in the market.”

Not Rockefellers

Gemdale, a residential developer based in Shenzhen, sold 25
percent of its debt to private banks on Feb. 25, a person
familiar with the matter said at the time. DBS agreed to buy
Societe Generale SA’s Asian private banking business this week
in a $220 million deal that will boost its high-net-worth assets
under management by more than 20 percent, according to a March
17 statement.

“We know Asian investors’ mentality,” Lee said. “These
aren’t European ultra high net worth, they aren’t the U.S.
Rockefeller descendants that are so well acquainted with the
market they punt it. These are people that have just stepped
into the market and they’re using this as a cash substitute.”

Yuan deposits in Singapore have risen from about 142
billion yuan in the middle of last year to about 200 billion
yuan currently, Lee said. That compares with some 893 billion
yuan in Hong Kong as of January, according to figures from the
city’s monetary authority.

The average yield on offshore yuan-denominated bonds sold
by corporates rose to 4.63 percent yesterday, the most since
October, according to HSBC Holdings Plc indexes.

Maoye International Holdings Ltd., a Shenzhen-based
department store operator, postponed a planned offering of Dim
Sum bonds today, three people familiar with the matter said. The
company was marketing the three-year notes at about 7.25
percent, a person with knowledge of the details said earlier
this week. DBS wasn’t managing that sale.

DBS may also help more companies from Southeast Asia access
the offshore yuan market. The bank, Southeast Asia’s largest,
was the fifth-biggest arranger of loans in Asia outside Japan
last year and dominates its home market, ranking no. 1 for loans
in Singapore the last three years running.